Key Focal Points of Building a Test Strategy for a Fintech App

When I start working on creating a test strategy for an application, one of the biggest impacting factors that I need to consider is the application domain. It defines a lot of context for any stage of software development, but it is especially important for QA processes. Domain determines how users interact with your app, the accepted complexity of the user interface (or, on the contrary, the required simplicity of it), user flows preferred by a particular audience, expected features and functionality and more. Of course, all of it reflects on QA procedures.

The fintech domain has its distinct specifics that make testing of QA applications different, so if you use a generic testing strategy, you may not cover all the important aspects of your app with tests and fail to deliver a product that meets the expectations of stakeholders and users. In this article I’d like to explain what you should focus on when testing a fintech app and how the fintech domain peculiarities affect the QA processes.

Key Factors in Fintech Domain that impact the QA & Testing Strategy

Fintech apps have their specifics, determined by their target audience and purpose and the fact that they all deal with money and funds. Let’s take a look at what factors have the profound effect on how fintech apps look, function and should be tested: 

1. The trend is, end users are moving their financial activities to the mobile sphere en masse, be it day-to-day banking or online shopping.
2. Fintech apps are usually multi-tier, large-scale, high-load apps with tons of simultaneous transactions, huge arrays of handled data, batch and real-time processing.
3. Fintech apps usually involve numerous third-party integrations with payment systems, payment gateways, third-party app user accounts, vendors.
4. Fintech apps have specific security requirements because they handle confidential financial and personal user data, such as transaction details, personal information.

Defining the Scope

Although the above-mentioned factors influence all fintech apps, the apps themselves can be drastically different even within the same domain. That is why, when designing a test strategy, it is also important to understand the business needs and pains and concentrate our QA efforts on the implementation of the functionality that is crucial for the business. 

Fintech projects take pains to streamline user experiences, so testing for usability, security, functionality and compatibility comes to the front. When you define the scope of testing for a fintech app, keep in mind that businesses usually opt for a customer-centric testing strategy, because customer satisfaction and loyalty are key factors for the app’s successful launch.

When you work with outlining the testing scope, your aim is to pinpoint what is being tested, how it is being tested and what are objectives of the tests, at all stages of development. As a result, you should have a clear picture of your QA life-cycle with definite milestones. I recommend using graphic visualization of this process. For example, a mind map with all the connections and interdependencies of the QA process elements will give the team a good overview of the entirety of the process and the position of particular tasks.

Another important issue you need to tackle while defining the test scope is your target audience and how it may influence the testing process. Target audience can be very different within the domain. For example, a user persona for a routine online banking app, which is used by people with practically all technical backgrounds and by adults of all ages, will be very different from a user persona for a user of a crypto wallet application, which usually caters to a far more specific user crowd.

Defining the Metrics of your QA Strategy

The specifics of financial technology products also influence the metrics which help you understand, when testing, whether your application is on par with the industry standards. The influence is reflected in what metrics become more important and what metrics bear less weight. Metrics that should be prominently featured in a fintech app testing include security, compatibility, usability, user experience.

For more relevant workload distribution within the QA team, pay attention to project efficiency metrics, such as test coverage, test execution time, test case pass and failure rate, test case rework rate. Observing these will help you keep an eye on how to plan your workload more effectively and stay on time with the development cycles.

Usability metrics become some of the most prominent indicators both for your stakeholders and for users. Research shows that users can overlook the flaws in ui design, but will put high demand on the ease and comfort of use of a fintech app. Pay special attention to task success rate, time on task, accessibility, learning curve and error rate. This is what will influence customer satisfaction and user retention of your application when it is launched.

Test Strategy Focal Points for a Fintech App

Although generally a QA strategy for a financial technology product will include all regular testing domains, they will have their specifics. Let’s take a closer look at them.

1.   Functional Testing Focus

The complicated part of testing the functionality of a fintech app is that it deals with a huge amount of financial calculations, transactions and handling large arrays of data. Ideally, you should cover all of these by tests, but with limited resources, I would recommend, when compiling a test strategy, to see if in your plan you can cut down the amount of tests for this huge quantity of similar cases. One way to do it is to use test scenarios instead of test cases with atomic structure. Test scenarios include sequences of actions, and with a larger possibility cover all possible event sequences, from generic to marginal.

2.   Performance Testing Focus

It is probably safe to say that almost any fintech app is a high-load app, with multiple users, great numbers of simultaneous transactions, and high traffic loads. This means that your performance testing should focus on performance testing that is typical for a high-load app. You should test to see how the app withstands high degrees of stress and varying loads, how scalable and stable it is, and how quickly it can recover from a failover. Your performance testing should also include availability and resilience testing, spike testing, because most fintech apps will have defined spikes of user activity.

3.   Usability Testing Focus

Usability testing is one of the most important QA aspects of a fintech app testing strategy. I’d like to reiterate that businesses want to see QA strategies for fintech products as very much user-centered, because the competition in this field is high and user loyalty and retention are key to the app’s success. If a user doesn’t like something in a fintech app, they will usually have plenty of alternatives to switch to. Users of fintech apps are very keen on simple and intuitive user mechanics. Your tests should make sure that all user flows are comfortable, simple, all elements are accessible and easy to understand for your particular user audience. For example, the younger generation, which has already grown up with gadgets, prefer intuitive UX design and will have no problem adapting to new user flows. Users of day-to-day banking apps can have little to none technical background, and for them, using an online banking app is more an unpleasant necessity than a routine task. For them, the application should offer very clear, unambiguous and familiar workflows.

Another aspect of Usability Testing for fintech products is covering troubleshooting mechanisms to see how fast users can troubleshoot their problems. Fintech apps operate with users’ funds and money, and if a transaction fails or gets lost, a user should have very clear and accessible options and steps they can take to try and solve the problem.

4.   Security Testing Focus

I think it's obvious that security is essential for a fintech app since it works with money transfers and has access to sensitive user data, such as credit card and bank account details, payment information, passwords. Your tests should cover vulnerability to hacking, data breaches and all possible security and privacy threats. For instance, penetration testing will help you see how your app behaves in a similar-to-real scenario of an attack.

Fintech apps usually have  many dependencies with third-party products, such as APIs  or third-party app accounts. Each of such dependencies can present a security liability, so when you compile your compatibility and security parts of the test strategy, bear in mind that your security tests should cover those as well.

5.   Integration Testing Focus

A typical fintech product integrates with a large number of other applications, components and resources. In fact, large integration capacity becomes a competitive advantage of a fintech app, so, for the business to use it as such, QA needs to make sure that integrations work properly.  Your test plan should cover testing third-party APIs to make sure they are accessible and secure. Fintech apps are multi-tier apps which have a modular structure, so testing module integration is vital. 

A fintech app usually implies working with databases, so your integration testing should include database integrity, data loading and accuracy testing. You can use the golden master method to test your database integration to see if the database interacts in a correct way with various common sets of input data. Another viable option for testing database integration is to use CRUD operations.

Key Takeaways

When compiling a Test Strategy for a fintech application, it is important to keep in mind the business goals of this application, what your customers and your end-users want to see in the product.  From the development process point of view it also means that your testing strategy should correctly prioritize at all stages of development, in order to cover with tests the relevant features and functionality depending on the project phase.

Your focal points in various testing domains largely depend on the specifics of the fintech domain, what the audience expects to see. Delivering a bug-free, user-friendly product is essential for the highly competitive fintech domain, so your test strategy should ensure that the QA team is on the same page not only with the development, but also with the business needs and user expectations.